


(Swing, Swing, Swing) When The Free Winds Blow

by inlovewithnight



Category: Pirates of the Caribbean
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2010-02-10
Updated: 2010-02-10
Packaged: 2017-10-07 04:09:18
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,910
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/61279
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/inlovewithnight/pseuds/inlovewithnight
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
      <p>Futurefic, spoilers for At World's End.</p>
    </blockquote>





	(Swing, Swing, Swing) When The Free Winds Blow

**Author's Note:**

> Futurefic, spoilers for At World's End.

She forces her hand between the bars, stretching her fingers as far as they will go, straining until cool drops brush against them and she can feel the rain. This is the same rain that falls over faraway lands and distant seas, places she has been that will never be other than myth to more than a handful of others. This rain comes from a storm that blew in from the ocean, her beloved ocean, carried over the waves that have been her home for so long. The life that she never should have had, but did, the life she carved out with her bare hands and her stubborn will and the sacrifices of a few men whose names she carries around her throat like stones.

"If you're trying to escape, bitch, it's not possible."

She watches raindrops run down her fingers from tip to palm, cold and silvery against her skin. "I'm not."

"Good. Because it's not possible."

She turns her head enough to glare at him, a child in a soldier's uniform taunting her from the corridor outside her cell. "I heard you the first time."

He takes a step forward, clearly thinking himself menacing, and she bites her tongue against laughter that would only earn her trouble. Her jaw aches from where this boy or one identical to him punched her in the battle for her ship, when they dragged her from her quarterdeck and brought here here. The Tower-- she devoured its grisly stories along with all of the pirate tales as a girl, she knows all of the horrible deaths that have taken place inside its walls. The notion that she will be one of them soon enough feels oddly proper. After all, she lived the pirate stories, why should she not die the traitor's death?

"I'm only trying to feel the rain," she says, looking away from him again to watch the dull clouds over the courtyard.

"You'll feel plenty of it over your grave, I'd wager."

He means to scare her, she supposes. Send a chill into her heart with thoughts of mortality and death and hell. She could tell him to save his breath, that she has been to the other side and she has seen what awaits her and there is no fear in her heart, not even a shred, but it would deprive the boy of his fun and she sees no purpose in it.

They call her a murderess, a traitor, a demon from the lowest pits. They lined the streets and screamed all of that and worse at her as the King's men hauled her from the ship to the Tower. Her people, she thought at the time, watching them curse and shout and shove each other in front of the cart-horses. All of them her people by blood, by virtue of the nation she was born to; some of them her people by choice, the thieves and beggars with whom pirates claimed kinship in spirit. Those were the ones who threw the stones and garbage the most energetically, grateful for a holiday. She was not surprised in the slightest. After all, kinship with pirates means that one should expect the same degree of loyalty and ease of betrayal. She has been the Pirate King long enough to know that degree intimately well.

That is a point that _does_ rankle her: the broadsheets and the barkers scream about the forthcoming trial of the Pirate Queen, and she wants to tell the lot of them that she is _king_ and worked bloody damned hard to be so. The least they could do is get that right, if they're determined to bring her to their notion of justice and then hang her in the rain. The least they could do is let her die under her proper title and her proper name. If her memory will be tarnished, let it be _accurate_.

But that would be far more mercy than she should expect from anyone, anymore. She knows better.

Her fingers are growing numb from the rain, and she knows that the sensation will spread quickly up her arm. It won't stand for being stretched and abused this way, not for long, not after all she's done to it in her life. Dislocations and lacerations and being tied behind her back for hours more times than she can count. Sometimes even while she was being held prisoner.

She smiles a bit at her own risqué, foolish humor--_can't help it; pirate_, whispers an echo of a long-ago self and a long-lost friend deep in her mind--and rests her cheek against the bars, wishing she could feel the raindrops on her face. So many years at the helm, being kissed by the cool salt spray. She wishes for its comfort now.

She has no illusions of reprieve or rescue. Barbossa was right long ago, that the world was changing, the magic and wildness being forced out like juice from an orange by the press of order and rules and civilization. She and her kind resisted far longer than they had any right to expect. These last years of freedom have been a gift unearned, and she has treasured them, and she is surprised to find that she does not...entirely...begrudge their passing. Oh, she would live if she could, but if she cannot, she is grateful that she has been able to live to the fullest.

Barbossa is long gone, forgotten even amongst pirates. All of the other pirate lords who followed the first time she raised her banner are gone as well, replaced by either pretenders or poseurs or not replaced at all. She is not the last of the pirates, but she is the last of the pirates worth speaking of, the last with any belief beyond petty greed and cruelty.

She can hear Jack Sparrow laughing at her for even the thought. Jack never did believe in that sort of thing. He's kept her humble for all of these years, the ghost of him in the back of her mind.

She doesn't know if Jack is truly dead; rumors have never stopped chasing his name, and she has never tried to trace any of them to the truth. She realized long ago that she could not bear confirmation that she lived in a world without Jack Sparrow in it: the fact of his death would crush the last shreds of magic left. Better not to know, better to let the dream keep wandering about in search of a good stiff breeze, and rum, and immortality.

The word hurts, as it always does. She draws a careful breath and thinks of Will, making his rounds on the other side of the world's end. By now he must know, from her own crewmen or the Navy's who fell in the battle. She won't die at sea, but she has enough salt water in her veins to call her back to him. And his heart. Far, far away, in the safest place she ever found, she left his heart.

He will be waiting for her. If Calypso feels inclined to kindness, perhaps they can even stay together. Elizabeth has tested the patience of her patron goddess by proxy many times over the years, by finding all of the bends between rules and guidelines and dancing over them with swords drawn. She has not been _faithful_, but she has been _true_, in her heart and in her mind, and so Will remains himself and free within the bounds of the curse for as long as she comes to meet him every ten years.

"I won't be there this time, darling," she whispers. "With any luck I'll be at your side."

"Who are you talking to, Miss Swann?"

She turns from the window, startled to see the guard replaced by a young man dressed in black. "No one," she says, drawing her arm back into the cell and wincing at the stiffness of her shoulder. "No one at all."

"Not your demon familiar?" He is smiling faintly, his voice light and amused, and she smiles back before she can check herself. She has always had a weakness for those who see the humor in the world.

"I'm afraid not." She moves to the cot and sits, drawing her legs up under herself. "If I had such a thing, I'm sure I would be far from here by now. I am no witch, sir, no sorceress; only another woman."

"Hardly that." He steps a bit closer to the bars, close enough for her to see the flash of white at his collar. "You are the Pirate Queen. Nothing ordinary about that."

"King."

"What?"

"Pirate King...it doesn't matter." She sighs and shakes her head, looking back to the window. "Have you come to take my confession, then? I thought they had every intention of torturing it out of me. A chat with a priest hardly seems sufficiently dramatic."

"Your confession will be taken by the court," he says, his smile fading. She suspects that the disapproval in his eyes is for the court more than it is for her, and suddenly she realizes of whom he reminds her. James Norrington, so long ago she can barely remember his face, the King's man through and through and yet with his own code of honor, firm as steel.

"Then to what do I owe this visit?"

"That is your confession to man. I am here to take your confession to God. Your repentance."

She blinks, pausing in her effort to massage some feeling back into her hand. "Repentance?"

"For your crimes. The blood you have shed. The deaths on your hands. Your rebellion against King and country." He takes a Bible from his robe and beings to page through it. "You have much to repent, Miss Swann."

"I will repent nothing." She looks down at her hands, flexing the chilled one again and again. "I am sorry for those I have killed, but I reached peace with God over that long ago. And I will not apologize for a single other thing I have done with my life."

"You are a criminal and a murderer. A traitor, Miss Swann."

"I have lived free, and on my own terms." She meets his eyes now, unflinching. She has not flinched in over twenty years. "Very few are so fortunate. And so I will apologize for nothing."

He closes the Bible and frowns at her through the bars. "No one will mourn for you, you know. Your name will go down as the worst that history has to offer, and not a soul will remember you with kindness for what you have done."

She thinks of that faraway land again, and a young man there who is beginning to live his own life, free and assured of his own choices because of what she has done, the life she has lived. "As you say."

He tucks the book back into his pocket. "I will pray for you, Miss Swann."

"Pray for yourself," she says, looking out the window at the dull sky and slate-gray sheets of rain. Somewhere Will is sailing through choppy seas, under a gleaming cloudless sky. The rain won't reach him for another day, running down and washing the Dutchman's deck silver. Perhaps she will be there by then. "And everyone else who lives a life in cages and will never feel the rain."


End file.
